Larry Summers

"I am concerned that the appointment for Treasury Secretary offers either a great opportunity or a lost one or in one case would create a future problem. The latter, obviously, is Larry Summers who is... arrogantly unpleasant to his subordinates, dismissive to his equals and pandering to his superiors."

“The average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn’t even wish to have to think.”

"...debt is simply everywhere, at least to the extent we can see and measure it. Corporate and sovereign debt, of both the developed world and emerging market varieties, are at record levels. China’s debts certainly add to that record but who really knows to what extent? It’s the ultimate black box of leverage on Planet Earth... You cannot NOT worry about the Fed in this world...The simple truth is ending reinvestment would bring the bond market to its knees.”

This past Saturday October 8th, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko “Peter Pan” Kuroda delivered some prepared remarks on its new QQE with yield control (see here and here) at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. The conference was attended by "luminaries" like Jeffries’ David Zervos, Princeton economist and Hillary supporter Alan Blinder, as well as many members of the press.

Currently economists and market watchers roughly fall into two camps: Those who believe that the Federal Reserve must begin raising interest rates now so that it will have enough rate cutting firepower to fight the next recession, and those who believe that raising rates now will simply precipitate an immediate recession and force the Fed into battle without the tools it has traditionally used to stimulate growth. Both camps are delusional, but for different reasons.

"QE need not be confined to bond instruments in our mind. By limiting themselves to bonds, central banks are indeed deemed to face quantitative constraints given declining government bond issuance even as spread product issuance has increased" - JPM

There was a time when former Harvard head and Democratic administration darling, Larry Summers, would draw out a crowd at every public appearance. Those days are gone, however, and now the formerly corpulent cogitator is forced to resort to Twitter for his rants, such as the one he unleashed early this morning when in "tweetstorm" of 11 consecutive tweets he slammed Yellen for even daring to think about tightening.